The backstory only made the footage more troubling.
According to several accounts, police were called in response to a fight
that broke out when a white adult told the black kids, some of whom had
hopped the fence to attend the event, to "go back to Section 8 [public
housing]."

To many, the story is just another addition to a
recent series of high-profile incidents in which police have been
accused of misconduct against African-Americans, a topic that has made
regular headlines since the police shooting of unarmed black 18-year-old
Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

But the setting here — a swimming pool where black
kids were swiftly identified as outsiders and reportedly subjected to
racial hostility for daring to be there, whether they were invited
guests or not — means it has its own unique context.

There's a case to be made that the very existence of private pools like the one in McKinney was a response to the end of legal segregation of municipal pools
in the late 1940s and early '50s. In other words: many white people
preferred to build their own pools than enjoy this type of recreation
side by side with their black neighbors.

That's according to Jeff Wiltse, the the author of Contested Waters, a book about the history of controversy surrounding America's public pools.

In a 2007 interview with NPR's Michel Martin,
he provided this interesting piece of insight into the anxiety around
intimate contact with black people, which he said made resistance to
integrating swimming pools even more contentious than integrating
schools in some cases:

And so the concern among white swimmers and public officials that if
blacks and whites swam together at these resort pools in which the
culture was highly sexualized, that black men would assault white women
with romantic advances, that they would try to make physical contact
with them, and that this was unacceptable to most northern whites ...

... There was a court case that emerged added an attempt by the local
NAACP to desegregate the municipal pools in Baltimore. And this was
right after Brown v. Board of Education. And so the local attorney
argued that, well, schools may be being desegregated, but we can't have
swimming pools be desegregated because swimmers come in potentially
intimate contact with one another.

And so a federal judge upholding racial segregation of Baltimore
pools reconciled his decision with the recent Brown v. Board of
Education decision by claiming that pools were more sensitive than
schools, and that to integrate a swimming pool would not just
potentially, likely lead to race riots and all sorts of violence.

And so in the interest of the public good it was reasonable to keep
swimming pools segregated along racial lines, even though the Supreme
Court had ruled separate but equal was unconstitutional at schools.

There's of course not legally enforced racial
segregation anymore, and it's doubtful that any of the white residents
of McKinney — even the one who allegedly directed the kids back to
Section 8 housing — would say they were squeamish about physical contact
with African Americans.

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